Toshio Iwai

Toshio Iwai (岩井 俊雄, Iwai Toshio^?, born 1962) is a Japanese interactive media and installation artist who has also created a number of commercial video games. In addition he has worked in television, music performance, museum design and digital musical instrument design.

Iwai was born in Kira, Aichi, Japan. As a child, he spent time creating flip book-style animations in the corner of text books and making motor-driven mechanical toys, since these were the only technologies available to him. In 1981 Iwai matriculated in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Tsukuba, studying Plastic Art and Mixed Media. Influenced by the work of Norman McLaren, he began producing installation art that combined pre-cinema animation techniques (the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope) with modern methods of image capture and creation (, video cameras and computer graphics) and of stroboscopic lighting (video monitors, video projectors and LEDs). His 1985 installation Time Stratum won the Gold prize at the High Technology Art Exhibition '85, held in Shibuya Seibu, Tokyo.Time Stratum II was awarded the Grand Prize at the 17th Contemporary Japanese Art Exhibition, Meguro Art Museum, Tokyo. In 1987 Iwai graduated from the University of Tsukuba with a master's degree in Plastic Art and Mixed Media. In the same year, Iwai designed his first published videogame, , in association with ASCII Corporation.

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